Why isn’t Elon Musk’s Twitter letting people view the site without a login?
This week, Twitter has begun blocking users from viewing the social-media platform’s website if they aren’t signed in to an account.
Twitter has blocked access to its website to any users who aren’t signed in to an account, in a move that the social-media giant’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, has described as a “temporary emergency measure”.
Previously, it was possible to browse Twitter’s web version without having to log in; as of this week, however, a sign-in prompt has begun appearing if unregistered users try to view content on the platform.
This prompted suggestions that the change is an attempt by Twitter to boost its number of registered accounts, as it struggles to keep up with other social-media platforms’ active-user figures.
Twitter acting against data scraping - Musk
In a tweet on Friday, however, Musk said the move was a bid to stop data scrapers who are “extremely aggressively” harvesting information from the site.
The 52-year-old, who bought Twitter in a $44bn deal in October 2022, seemed to say that this spate of scraping activity has been overwhelming the company’s systems.
“[This is a] temporary emergency measure,” Musk wrote. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
He later stressed that access to unregistered users “will be unlocked shortly”, adding: “Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.
“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
“It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”
As of Saturday morning ET, AS USA remained unable to access Twitter without logging in.
What is data scraping?
Data scraping occurs when a computer program pulls large quantities of information from a website.
In the wake of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, there has been a growth in automated scraper bots that harvest data from internet pages, potentially overloading those sites with the amount of web traffic they generate.
“We absolutely will take legal action against those who stole our data & look forward seeing them in court, which is (optimistically) 2 to 3 years from now,” Musk said.